The Final Strife Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Q: Is the Ending Fire Trilogy finished?

Yes. The Battle Drum followed in 2023 and The Ending Fire completed the trilogy in 2024. Book two is the best-rated of the three on Goodreads; the finale is the most divisive.

Updated on October 9, 2026

Verdict: A blood-caste epic fantasy with one of the most original worlds in recent sapphic SFF and a genuinely moving addiction arc, held back by a slow first half, a pushy love triangle and a romance that shares the stage rather than owning it.

Best for: Readers who want big-canvas rebellion fantasy with queer women at the centre, who are happy to wait 200 pages for the plot to catch fire, and who can treat the sapphic romance as one thread among several.

Heat level: ★★★☆☆ (3/5 — open door)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.8/5 — a 4.14 Goodreads average across 10,034 ratings, discounted for a slow start readers keep naming)

Tropes: Rivals-to-lovers, slow burn, rebellion against a caste empire, tournament trials, failed chosen one, love triangle, multiple POV, found family, switched at birth, blood magic.

The Final Strife by Saara El-Arifi is the first book of the Ending Fire Trilogy, a traditionally published sapphic fantasy from Del Rey, set in a desert empire where the colour of your blood decides your caste — and where Sylah, raised by rebels to seize the throne and now lost to grief and drugs, collides with Anoor, the sheltered daughter of the woman who rules it all.

It holds a 4.14 average across 10,034 Goodreads ratings, a 4.24 on StoryGraph, a positive Kirkus review and a Publishers Weekly write-up, and a completed trilogy behind it. It also has a vocal minority who found the first half a slog, and a slow burn that some readers felt was sold harder than it is written. Both halves are worth understanding before you commit to three long books.

What Is The Final Strife About?

The Final Strife is epic fantasy first and romance second, and that ordering matters. The world draws on Ghanaian folklore and Arabian myth, and the engine is political: red-blooded Embers rule and hold a monopoly on blood magic, blue-blooded Dusters labour, and clear-blooded Ghostings are maimed at birth so they can never speak or write. That structure gives the book its rebellion, its tournament and its moral weight — and means the romance is competing with a revolution for page time.

Sylah is the heart of it — a girl trained from childhood to be the spark of that revolution, who watched the people who raised her killed and has spent the years since fighting in rigged bouts and chasing joba seeds. Anoor is her mirror: brought up in the palace, belittled by a mother who happens to be the most powerful woman in the empire, and underestimated by everyone including herself. Hassa, a Ghosting who moves unseen through the city’s servants, completes the trio. Multiple third-person POVs show the empire from top to bottom — and cost it pace.

What Makes This Sapphic Epic Fantasy Work

The blood-caste world: The single most-praised element, including in the negative reviews. Readers call the concept original, and the blood-as-ink rune magic draws repeated admiration for being inventive without reading as self-harm.
A queer-normative society: Readers repeatedly single out an empire where queerness is unremarkable and trans and nonbinary people are revered, with Hassa, a trans Ghosting woman, among its most-loved characters.
Sylah’s addiction arc: A failed chosen one who backslides, relapses and keeps going. Reviewers describe it as realistic and non-linear, and it is the character work people name first.
The frenemy dynamic: Sylah and Anoor’s push and pull is what the sapphic readership came for — spiky, uneven and, in the reviews that love it, genuine. Several frame it as enemies-to-lovers; the author calls it friends to lovers.
The last act: Even readers who struggled agree the final stretch is where the book catches fire.

Book Synopsis

Twenty years ago, a rebel movement called the Sandstorm tried something audacious: take red-blooded babies from the ruling class, raise them among the blue-blooded poor, and train them to win the Aktibar — the trials that decide who governs the Wardens’ Empire. Sylah was one of those children. She grew up being told she would light the fire that freed everyone. Then the Sandstorm was wiped out in front of her, and the fire went with it.

Now Sylah drifts through the city’s underside, taking dives in fixed fights for a crime boss and losing whole days to the seeds that dull everything. Her only steady presence is Hassa, a Ghosting friend who speaks to her in hand-sign, and refuses to let her disappear. Across the city, Anoor has spent twenty years trying to earn one kind word from her mother, the Warden herself, and preparing for an Aktibar that everyone assumes she will lose.

When the trials approach, a chance encounter binds the two girls together — Sylah with skills Anoor badly needs, Anoor with access Sylah could never reach alone. Hassa, meanwhile, is carrying a secret of her own that could reignite everything the Sandstorm died for. As the Aktibar begins and the nightly storm called the tidewind batters the city, the question is not only who will win, but whether the empire’s founding story was ever true — and what it will cost these three to find out.

My Review

The world is the reason to read this, and it is the one point on which the praise and the pans agree. Blood-colour castes, magic written in the rulers’ own blood, a storm that hits the city every night — El-Arifi builds something that feels lived-in rather than assembled. The Ghanaian and Arabian texture is doing real work, and the queer-normative society is handled with an ease readers keep thanking the book for.

The second strength is Sylah. A chosen one who has failed before page one is a useful subversion, and the addiction is written with patience: she relapses, she lies, she lets people down, and the book does not rush her out of it. Anoor is the other great creation — one fan calls her the shining star — and StoryGraph readers back that up, with 94% saying the characters show strong development. Hassa is the quiet scene-stealer.

Where it struggles is pace, and this is not my gripe alone — it is the complaint that turns up in more low-star reviews than any other. Reader after reader says nothing much happens until the halfway mark, that the Aktibar trials carry little tension, and that the book only really ignites in its final tenth. It is long: 593 pages on Kindle. Behind that sits a line-level complaint — telling over showing, clunky exposition, comma-heavy prose — with more than one reader calling it an early draft. StoryGraph’s 7% did-not-finish rate is roughly twice what I usually see on titles I review, and the DNF reviews name the slow start almost every time.

One expectation to reset: this is marketed with its sapphic romance up front, and it reads as epic fantasy with a romance subplot. Sylah is bisexual, and her on-page history with Jond — her childhood friend and ex-lover — takes up more room than some readers expected, to the point that a handful describe feeling baited. If the romance is what drew you, calibrate; if you want a rebellion epic where queer women simply run the story, you are in exactly the right place.

My honest note: A five-star world wrapped around a three-star first half. If you need a romance to drive the plot, this will frustrate you. If you want a sapphic epic you can sink three books into, get through the first 200 pages and it pays off.

Element	In The Final Strife
Central relationship	Sylah & Anoor — a rebel-raised addict and the Warden’s underestimated daughter, rivals-to-lovers with a love triangle
Core tropes	Rivals-to-lovers, slow burn, tournament trials, rebellion, failed chosen one, love triangle
Setting	The Wardens’ Empire — a desert empire divided by blood colour and battered nightly by the tidewind
Heat level	3/5 — open door
Series	Ending Fire Trilogy book 1 — trials plot closes, story continues; trilogy complete
Content notes	Drug addiction, graphic violence and gore, mutilation, slavery, child and parental abuse, child death, fatphobic descriptions, sexual content

How Spicy Is The Final Strife?

A 3/5. romance.io rates the steam level “open door” — its middle band — on a small base of 37 ratings, which matches how readers describe it: sex happens on the page, but it is brief, infrequent and never the point.

The element worth knowing in advance is who gets that page time. Readers note that much of the romantic page time in book one goes to Sylah and Jond rather than Sylah and Anoor, and one puts it bluntly: a lot of m/f for a book marketed as f/f. Beyond that, no reviewer flags anything explicit enough to warn about. For the same open-door band in epic fantasy, A Day of Fallen Night sits right alongside it, and The Priory of the Orange Tree runs a notch cooler.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: worldbuilding is the first thing you judge a fantasy by, you want queer women and trans characters at the centre of an epic rather than on its margins, you like flawed heroines who make bad choices, and you are ready to commit to a completed trilogy.

You may want to skip it if: a slow first half makes you quit, you are reading for an f/f romance that drives the plot, love triangles with a man in them are a dealbreaker, or you have no patience for fatphobic narration aimed at a lead character.

In short: an extraordinary world and a messy, human cast, delivered at a pace that asks for faith before it earns it.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

There is no viral moment behind this book, and it doesn’t need one. BookTok activity is small and organic — individual creators posting quick reviews and quotes, none of it trending — and Reddit could not be checked from here. What The Final Strife has instead is a conventional big-publisher launch that worked: a six-figure US deal and a five-way UK auction, blurbs from Samantha Shannon, Tasha Suri and C.L. Clark, best-of-year picks from Oprah Daily and Autostraddle, and a place on Amazon’s best books of 2022. Her later books, including the Faebound series and Cleopatra, now send readers back to where it started.

The audiobook is narrated by Nicole Lewis, with Dominic Hoffman, and runs 19 hours and 48 minutes. Listeners talk about the length more than the performance, so treat it as a commitment rather than an easy way in.

Prefer audio? Listen to The Final Strife on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The world, first and by a distance — “original” and “unique” are the recurring words. Then the representation: a queer-normative empire, a trans Ghosting POV and disabled characters written as full people. Anoor is the fan favourite, Hassa the one people want a whole book about. And the ending, which readers describe in capital letters; the twists reframe the empire’s history and most people finish desperate for book two. Grimdark Magazine gave it five stars.

What readers argue about and complain about: Pace, above everything — slow to start, long in the middle, and good only in its last stretch for the readers who struggled. Publishers Weekly called it fast-paced and praised it for teaching its rules through action rather than exposition — the exact opposite of what the low-star reviews say, and the most useful gap to know about before you start. Second: the writing, with repeated complaints about telling over showing, infodumping and punctuation. Third, fatphobia. At least five readers across the rating range flag descriptions of Anoor’s body and eating, and one reader DNF’d over it. Fourth, the love triangle with Jond, which at least one reader finds uncomfortably close to adoptive-sibling territory and others resent for pulling focus from Anoor. Opinions genuinely divide on age category: it is published as adult, but several readers say it reads like YA.

The series question everyone should ask first: the trilogy is finished, so there is no wait. Book one closes its trials plot but ends on a major revelation, not a resolution — you will want book two. The Battle Drum (2023) is the highest-rated of the three at 4.26 across about 4,800 Goodreads ratings, and readers keep calling it one of the best sequels they have read, though Sylah and Anoor spend it apart. The finale, The Ending Fire (2024), is the lowest at 4.05 and the most divisive: a real share of readers found it rushed and felt one lead’s turn came out of nowhere. If you love book one, book two is a safe bet; go into the finale with measured expectations.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Final Strife a sapphic romance?

Not primarily. It is an epic fantasy with a sapphic romance between Sylah and Anoor as a major subplot, and Sylah also has an on-page relationship with a man, Jond. Readers who expected an f/f romance at the centre are the most likely to be disappointed.

How spicy is The Final Strife?

A 3/5. romance.io rates it “open door,” its middle band. Sex is on the page but brief and infrequent, and readers note that much of the romantic page time goes to Sylah and Jond.

Does The Final Strife end on a cliffhanger?

Partly. The trials plot resolves, but the book ends on a major revelation that sets up the rest of the trilogy. It does not work as a standalone, but all three books are out.

Is the Ending Fire Trilogy finished?

Yes. The Battle Drum followed in 2023 and The Ending Fire completed the trilogy in 2024. Book two is the best-rated of the three on Goodreads; the finale is the most divisive.

Is The Final Strife YA or adult?

It is published as adult fantasy by Del Rey. Several readers say it reads closer to young adult or new adult in voice, and that is one of the clearest dividing lines in the reviews.

Is there an audiobook of The Final Strife?

Yes — narrated by Nicole Lewis, with Dominic Hoffman, running 19 hours and 48 minutes. It is a long listen, and at least one reader says the length made the slow start harder going.

If You Loved The Final Strife, Read These Next

If the empire-versus-rebellion engine is what hooked you, start with The Jasmine Throne — by Tasha Suri, another of this book’s blurbers — which sets a sapphic thread between two women on opposite sides of an empire. If the colonial politics are the draw, The Unbroken — by C.L. Clark, who blurbed this book — goes harder on the military and moral cost. And for sheer scale with a sapphic romance at the centre, The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, who also blurbed it, is the obvious next step.

For more in this register, browse our guide to the best sapphic fantasy books, our roundup of sapphic romantasy, or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

The Final Strife is a debut whose imagination outruns its pacing. The blood-caste empire is one of the most original settings in recent sapphic fantasy, Sylah’s addiction arc is written with real honesty, and the final act delivers twists that make the trilogy feel necessary. It is also slow to start, uneven at the sentence level, and less of a sapphic romance than its marketing suggests, with a love triangle and some fatphobic narration that cost it readers. If you want a queer rebellion epic and can give it 200 pages, it is worth the trip. Check The Final Strife on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, The Final Strife ranks as a world-first sapphic epic fantasy — inventive and emotionally serious, held back by a slow first half, and best approached for the rebellion and the empire rather than the romance.